Cleverness is a gift while kindness is achoice. Gifts are easy—they're given after all. Choices can be hard.

    I got the idea to start Amazon 16 yearsago. I came across the fact that the Internet usage was growing at 2,300percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, andthe idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles was veryexciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for ayear. I told my wife Mac kenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go to do thiscrazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most start-ups don't and I wasn'tsure what to expect. Mac kenzie told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted meto follow my passion.

    I was working at a financial firm in NewYork City with a bunch of very smart people and I had a brilliant boss that Imuch admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a companyselling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park,listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea,but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a goodjob.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about itfor 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it was reallya difficult choice, but finally, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always behaunted (萦绕)by a decision to not try at all.

    After much consideration, I took theless safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice. For all ofus, in the end, we are our choice.

    The Colonel（上校） asked Ashenden a good many questions and then suggested that he had particular qualifications for the Secret Service. Ashenden knew several European languages and the fact that he was a writer provided excellent cover: on the pretext（借口） that he was writing a book he could, without attracting attention, visit any neutral country.

    It was while they were discussing this point that the Colonel said, "You know you might get material that would be very useful to you in your work. I'll tell you an incident that occurred only recently. Very dramatic. A foreign government minister went down to a Mediterranean resort to recover from a cold and he had some very important documents with him that he kept in a dispatch case（公文箱）. A day or two after he arrived, he picked up a beautiful blonde at some restaurant or other, and he got very friendly with her . He took her back to his hotel, and when he came to himself in the morning, the lady and the dispatch-case had disappeared. They had one or two drinks up in his room and his theory is that when his back was turned the woman slipped a drug in his glass.

    "Do you mean to say that happened the other day?" said Ashenden.

    "The week before last ."

    "Impossible," cried Ashenden. "Why! We've been putting that incident on the stage for sixty years, we've written it in a thousand novels. Do you mean to say that life has only just caught up with us?"

    "Well, I can guarantee the truth of the story." said the Colonel, "And believe me, the government has been put to no end of trouble by the loss of the documents."

    "Well sir, if you can't do better than that in the Secret Service," sighed Ashenden, " I'm afraid that as a source of inspiration to the writer of fiction, it's washout（失败）."

    After giving a talk at a high school,I was asked to pay a visit to a special student.An illness had kept the boy home,but he had expressed an interest in meeting me.I was told it would mean a great deal to him,so I agreed.

    During the nine-mile drive to his home,I found out something about Matthew.He had muscular dystrophy（肌肉萎缩症）.When he was born,the doctor told his parents that he would not live to five,and then they were told he would not make it to ten.Now he was thirteen.He wanted to meet me because I was a Gold-medal power lifter,and I knew about overcoming obstacles and going for my dreams.

    I spent over an hour talking to Matthew.Never once did he complain or ask,"Why me?"He spoke about winning and succeeding and going for his dreams.Obviously,he knew what he was talking about.He didn't mention that his classmates had made fun of him because he was different.He just talked about his hopes for the future,and how one day he wanted to lift weights with me.When we had finished talking,I went to my briefcase（公文包）and pulled out the first gold medal I had won and put it around his neck.I told him he was more of a winner and knew more about success and overcoming obstacles than I ever would.He looked at it for a moment,then took it off and handed it back to me.He said,"You are a champion.You earned that medal.Someday when I get to the Olympics and win my own medal,I will show it to you."

    Last summer I received a letter from Matthew's parents telling me that Matthew had passed away.They wanted me to have a letter he had written to me a few days before:

Dear Dick,

    My mum said I should send you a thank-you letter for the picture you sent me.I also want to let you know that the doctors tell me that I don't have long to live any more,but I still smile as much as I can.I told you someday that I would go to the Olympics and win a gold medal,but I know now I will never get to do that.However,I know I'm a champion,and God knows that too.When I get to Heaven,God will give me my medal and when you get there,I will show it to you.Thank you for loving me.

Your friend,

Matthew

    In Chinese customs, red is the main color for weddings. It is used in different ways as it signifies love, joy and happiness. The bride's wedding gown（女礼服）is often red, the wedding invitations, gift boxes and envelopes are red and the bride and the groom's homes are decorated in red on the wedding day.

    Before the wedding, the married couples from the groom's family visit the bride's place with gifts in red baskets and boxes. One of those baskets has milk honey. Three days before the wedding, the women from the bride's family bring return-gifts to the groom's family.

    On the wedding day, the groom arrives at the bride's place on his way to the chapel（佛堂）. The groom has to give gifts in cash wrapped in red paper to the bride's friends for letting her go. The bride and the groom then leave for the chapel together.

    The wedding ceremony is attended only by the couple's immediate relatives. Just after the wedding ceremony, the bride serves tea to her parents in-laws as a tradition. The couples will then go to get wedding pictures. Then a reception（宴会）will follow.

    In the reception, a welcome speech is followed by a cake cutting ceremony. A Chinese wedding cake has many layers（层）, and each one represents a step to success for the newly married couples. So couples cut the cake from the bottom.

    Travour.com describes and provides information on the wedding traditions of the Chinese and around the world. Below are some wedding traditions performed in Italy.

    On December 26, 2004, hundreds of tourists relaxed on Sri Lanka's Yala National Park's beaches. But at mid-morning the park's elephants began crying wildly and running away from the ocean and up a nearby hill. The puzzled keepers could tell the animals were worried about something but what?

    What the keepers did not know was that a 30-foot wall of water was headed straight toward them. This tsunami(海啸) had been caused by an earthquake more than 1, 000 miles away in the Indian Ocean. When the huge wave hit the coast, it caused severe damage. Many people died. The elephants, however, were not swept away by the water. They stood safely on the hill.

    Scientists have long suspected that animals sense natural disasters before humans do. People have told stories of dogs refusing to go outside and sharks swimming to deeper waters before a hurricane. After the 2004 tsunami, people said they saw tigers, monkeys, and water buffalo escaping to higher ground before the waters rushed in. Even in the hardest-hit areas of southern Asia, there were few animal deaths.

    It's unlikely that an animal's so-called sixth sense comes from some magical power to see into the future. Experts believe that animals may be more sensitive than humans to changes in temperature and other environmental conditions that take place before a natural disaster. The elephants in Sri Lanka, for example, may have picked up vibrations from within the Earth, a sign that earthquake was coming. Because vibrations in the ground travel much faster than an ocean wave, the elephants may have felt the earthquake that caused the tsunami well before the tsunami itself came to the coast.

    A few scientists are calling for a system to track reports of strange behavior in people's pets, hoping that these reports can serve as a warning system that a natural disaster is about to happen. But Marina Haynes, an animal behavior scientist at the Philadelphia Zoo, says, "It would be an unreliable way to predict disasters. It can be difficult to know what an animal is doing. Is the animal nervous because an earthquake is about to happen or is it frightened because there is an enemy nearby?"

    Kakano means "seed" in Māori. For Jade Temepara, a Māori woman who was crowned New Zealand's Gardener of the Year in 2012, though, it means a lot more. Temepara owns Kākano, a Māori restaurant and cooking school in Christchurch, on New Zealand's South Island.

    Even a first-time tourist to New Zealand will notice the presence of the Māori culture and language everywhere. Now, so many non-Māori young people learn the language — a trend that picked up after the passage of the Māori Language Act in 1987 — that it's not unusual to hear teens and twenty somethings of European descent in Auckland asking their friends if they want to hang out and get some kai (food) later. That's a striking contrast from several generations ago, when New Zealand law banned Māori in schools, either in written or spoken form.

    While Temepara was happy to see the Māori language make a comeback, there were still parts of her native culture that were less present in New Zealand's daily life. She felt that too few Māoris of her generation were trained in their culture's traditional cooking methods and native ingredients (原料). That's when Temepara came up with the idea of launching a cooking education program that would go into Māori schools and other community gathering places to teach classes in traditional Māori cooking and food preparation.

    The idea was so successful that it eventually led to a brick-and-mortar cafe and shop in central Christchurch. There, Temepara trades in traditional kai — look for cold smoked mussels, karengo (a native seaweed), Manuka honey and a native variety of sweet potato called kumara.

    Although many of the ingredients grow wild in New Zealand, that doesn't mean just anybody can harvest them.

    "The Māori subtribe Katti Menguai are the only ones that are allowed to have some, if they come from a lineage of chiefs. It is by bloodline only. You can't even be invited. If you're not blood, that's it, you can't go. My family is of that lineage. And so, traditionally we would harvest the birds." This is both a tribal (部落的) practice and an accepted national law.